Designing Intelligent Networks for the 21st Century

First it was the Industrial revolution and now it is the vast Information at your fingertips. It is wonderful to see how “technology” has come to be, especially after the invention of computers, which literally ushered in a sense of urgency in the techno-centric leaps we seem to be taking now. In the area of IT, Networking and Computers, just when you think it’s over, you have something new and exciting sprouting up.

Business and technology, with their considerable leanings towards each other, form the impetus required for a stellar mutual growth; but no matter how much advancement comes about, there seems to be an insatiable appetite for more.

For IT organizations, most of the times, these changes don’t require a major overhaul of their network designs and hence they resort to “quick fixes” for their incumbent networking issues -- like adding WAN bandwidth which still has its limitations. As these “minor” fixes roll into a huge moss-gathering ball of problems, a need arises for a rather large move. An earnest need for a paradigm shift in the way new intelligent, super-layered, multi-purpose, competent, and cost-effective networks have to be developed, maintained, and run.

Benefits of Intelligent Networks

Intelligent information networks will have to be viewed as a strategic asset for the businesses. SelectSys solutions provide a proven 3-point approach to network design and deployment:

1. It focuses on convergence of data and voice and brings down lower cost of ownership, allows better network management and performance, provides robust security and more cost-effective scalability, and enables organizations to deploy advanced technologies.

2. Draws on the benefits of Dynamic Resource Utilization and brings down operational costs.

3. It extols the benefits of virtualization thereby paving way for the businesses to go “green”; reduce storage and server costs; redundant IT staff and management costs and much more.

An Intelligent Network to be designed for the 21st century must have the following attributes: 

Secure and compliant with government regulations: An Intelligent network must doubtlessly be made compliant at least with regards to some of the more popular ones like Sarbanes Oxley Act, Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Act, and even cater to stringent requirements like Business Continuity and Data recovery (BC/DR) ensuring an increased availability of Network resources and work towards the ever challenging state of “Business As Usual”. Non- Compliance has no excuses and can lead to loss of reputation, profits, and brand image. Any such gaucherie is trouble and all that needs to be done is a little forethought to be applied.

Mobile/Wireless: Most businesses have understood the need for an unshackled access to corporate networks, which saw the emergence of WLAN, Wi-Fi and remote access technology. The early WLANs could support data-only streams of traffic, but there would be a pressing demand to handle voice-traffic (hence a need to implement QoS in LAN) in the future.

Cost effective: Businesses are all about profit and exorbitant costs of networks are a drain. Companies are drawing out elaborate plans to minimize costs and at the same time achieve superior designs when it comes to their networks -- reduction of network sizes; making them smaller but even more efficient; the introduction of concepts like SAN (Small Area Network) and implementing IP storage to meet with the increasing demands for storage of all information passed between clients, businesses, vendors and individual customers.

Reliable, scalable, and redundant: A Network would be a weak link for a business if it cannot be reliable; it would be practically useless if it has to be discarded for a new, larger one when the company grows in size (scalability) and no part of the network should be redundant.

Unified / Collaborative: Most businesses today thrive on collaboration. Miracles are achieved through effective collaboration. First heralded by the Internet, collaboration suddenly went spineless but penetrated into hitherto unseen depths. Web 2.0 just pushed the equation and made it even more real. Open Source, Cloud Computing, Wikis and Blogs, have all redefined collaboration. Virtual Conferencing and TelePresence will redefine tomorrow’s meetings.

Support intelligent applications and technologies: It is vital for networks to support Web 2.0 technologies and intelligent applications to cope with increasing users demands and compete in the 21st century.

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